White. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls.The way they withdrew from the child’s body and spoke as if it were not there.What ghost comes to the bedside whispering You?— With its no one without its I —A dwarf ghost? A closet of empty clothes?Ours was a ghost who stole household goods….
for whom we searchedthrough here, or there, amidstbones still sleeved and trousered,a spine picked clean, a paint can,a skull with hairSewn into the hem of memory:Fire.God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,God notof philosophers or scholars. God not of poets.Night to night:child walking toward me through burning maizeover the clean bones of those…
Think you can put yourself in the groundLike plain potatoes and grow in Ohio?I am damn sick of getting fat like youThink you can lie through your Slovak?Tell filthy stories about the blood sausage?Pish-pish nights at the virgin in Detroit?I blame your raising me up for my Slav tongueYou beat me up out back, taught…
To what and to whom does one say yes?If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?Beneath a tattoo of stars the gate open, so silent so like a tomb.This is the city you most loved, an empty stairwellwhere the next rain lifts invisibly from the Seine.With solitude, your coat open, you walksteadily as…
Outside everything visible and invisible a blazing maple.Daybreak: a seam at the curve of the world. The trousered legs of the womenshimmered.They held their arms in front of them like ghosts.The coal bones of the house clinked in a kimono of smoke.An attention hovered over the dream where the world had been.For if Hiroshima in…
the ache of some field song in Salvador.The wind along the prison, cautiousas Francisco’s hands on the inside, touchingthe walls as he walks, it is his wife’s breathslipping into his cell each night while heimagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country.There is nothing one man will not do to another.
open our rooms to a momentof almonds, olives and windwhen we did not yet know what we were.The days in Mallorca were alike:footprints down goat-pathsfrom the beds we had left,at night the stars locked to darkness.At that time we were learningto dance, take our clothesin our fingers and openourselves to their hands.The veranera was with…
